Research Question: How has baseball changed in the past 40 years, and why has it changed?
I think this is interesting because baseball has taken a more statistical turn in the past 20 years, and I believe this should be reflected in the data. Teams started to value players based on different metrics, and I believe those desired metrics have increased over time in overall team stats.
The data I’m using is from Lahman’s Baseball Database which is found here, http://seanlahman.com/download-baseball-database/. I am focusing on a subset from Lahman’s Database called “teams” which contains various team statistics like home runs and strikeouts each year from 1871 to 2022.
Here’s a glance at the summary statistics of the numeric variables I will be focusing on from the data set. I chose these variables since they are fundamental in baseball. The data has been cleaned to only contain team statistics from 1980 onward, and statistics are normalized to per game.